Taking guns away from law-abiding citizens will do nothing

I am 70 years old. My dad gave me a single shot .22 rifle when I was 10, so I have been a firearm owner for 60 of those 70 years, and yet, I have never seen or heard a gun fired in anger. [1]

I gave up hunting years ago. We no longer need the meat, and I don’t get much of a kick out of shooting animals with big brown eyes anymore. I don’t have guns for hunting or for recreation or for sport. I have them for one reason and one reason only: For the protection of my wife, my family and my home. According to the U.S. Constitution, affirmed recently by the United States Supreme Court, it is my absolute Constitutional right (with reasonable restrictions) to have them for that very purpose. I have no intention of giving up that right.

I recognize though, that the Aurora theater shootings and the Sandy Hook school massacre will change the debate about guns in our society and will have consequences for gun rights. The thought of twenty, six-year old children, lying dead in a classroom, the bodies of each riddled with several bullets, is so abhorrent, so heartbreaking, that it cannot be ignored. I don’t think more gun control will lead to safer schools. Connecticut has very tough gun control laws already. Those laws did no good. But because of what happened at Sandy Hook, there will be more gun control – that is a foregone conclusion. Commercial availability of high capacity magazines will almost certainly become a thing of the past. The continued availability of so-called assault weapons and of semi-automatic weapons in general will be up for discussion.

But completely aside from the issue of guns, it would be a tragedy if we ignored the things that can actually be done to make our schools safer. The 1000 pound elephant in the room is that almost all of the recent mass shootings, Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora, and now the worst of the lot, Sandy Hook, have involved young men with serious mental problems. Under current law, only those who have been “adjudicated” to be severely mentally compromised are banned from purchasing or possessing firearms. If policy makers are to accomplish anything worthwhile, that must change. We must be able to identify those whose mental illness makes them a danger to society and take steps to keep firearms out of their hands.

It is apparent that first responders never arrive in time to prevent mass shootings. Anyone who reads this newspaper knows that the average response time of the Denver PD to a 911 call is 17 minutes. That’s no fault of the Denver PD. They are doing the best they can. Even if it was less than half that, say 7 minutes, it would still not help you if your home were being invaded by a criminal intent on killing you, your wife and your children and robbing your home. The police would show up just in time to draw chalk outlines around the deceased, just as they did at Columbine, Aurora and Sandy Hook. The plain fact is, you cannot rely on the police to save you. You can only rely on yourself. The same is true of our schools. If we really want to make our schools safer, here is something for the policy makers to consider: There should be a cadre of several carefully selected teachers in every school who have ready access to firearms and who are thoroughly trained by police in how to use them to prevent future Columbines and Sandy Hooks. They could be as effective as police officers and they are already on site. Had such a system been in place at Sandy Hook school last week, when the police finally arrived, they might have found only two or three bodies instead of 26.

Finally, any serious effort to curtail violence in our schools and in other public places, must consider the culture of violence in America, and how violent movies, TV shows and video games contribute to it.

No amount of discussion will do the slightest good unless the real issues are considered.

Richard Stacy usawyo@gmail.com is a former U.S. attorney for Wyoming. He was a Colorado Voices columnist in 2008. Colorado Voices is an annual competition among writers vying for the opportunity to publish columns of regional interest in The Denver Post.